From: "David Dyer-Bennet" : Hang on; people have been telling me that the fatal flaw in the LCD : screen is *lower* contrast than on CRTs. No? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrast_ratio it seems as usual, there are differing ways of measuring and expressing the idea of contrast ratio, one considers the available room light, another method does not. ANother method highlights dynamic contrast advantages over static "Emissive display technologies - where all pixels emit light individually, such as OLED, plasma, FED and SED - are capable of achieving a very good contrast ratio. This is also true with the case of CRT[1] which have a theoretically infinite contrast ratio and practically achieve such a high contrast ratio that this terminology usually does not refer to them." this is largely because the light is emitted when the gun in the CRT causes light to be emitted when it fires at the phosphor screen at a given part of the screen, the comparison being against the bit where NO emission occurs, thus no light. LCD' have a light that's always on and black is produced by blocking this light. There's a limit to how much can be blocked, and a limit to how bright the LCD backlight can go (obviously) and the difference between the two limits LCS's more than CRT's, OLED's or any of the others mentioned above Personally I have great hopes for OLED's and hope we see them on the market soon. Prices should be VERY cheap and sizes are not limited by existing problems in technology as the screen can be created by virtually 'printing' it on a substrate :) :) "A notable recent development in the LCD technology is the so called "dynamic contrast". When there is a need to display a dark image, the display would underpower the backlight lamp ..but will proportionately amplify the transmission through the LCD panel. This gives the benefit of realizing the potential static contrast ratio of the LCD panel in dark scenes... The drawback is that if a dark scene does contain small areas of superbright light, they may be sacrificed and blown out." "Some manufacturers have gone as far as using different device parameters for the two tests, even further inflating the calculated contrast ratio. .. one method to do this is to enable the white sector for the "on" part and disable it for the "off" part[4] This practice is rather dubious, as it will be impossible to reproduce such contrast ratios with any useful image content." There is of course a way to work it out, after all we're photographers and thus probably likely to have access to a light meter ;) it would be a simple matter of setting a desktop background to black, bringing up a white page and in a darkened room measuring the light values of each ! k
